A Canadian man is suing Montreal's Royal Victoria hospital. Baruch Tegegne, who suffers from diabetes and kidney failure, found a stranger in India who is willing to fly to Canada to donate his kidney. The head of the hospital's transplant team refused to screen the potential donor out of fear that the man was being paid for the kidney. The India man claims that he is a good Samaritan and simply wants to be paid for travel expenses and be compensated for his lost wages.

A simple search on organ donation brings up this site, Living Donors Online. These are their statistics:

Looking at relationships, 18.9% were a parent of the recipient, 16.6% were children, 0.3% were identical twins, 38.3% were full siblings, 1.2% were half siblings, 7.0% were some other blood relative, 12.6% were spouses, and 5.3% were some other unrelated donor.

Unrelated donor, we can assume, includes friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers.

While Canada bans the sale and purchase of human organs, it does not address the donation of organs by strangers, it does insist that living donors should be either close family or friends.

I personally have a difficult time believing that a stranger half the world away is willing to travel to Canada and undergo an extensive and painful surgery simply out of the good of his heart. Particularly someone from India where so called "kidney tours" have become popular.

Friends of Tegegne are planning on appealing to the BC Transplant Association to see if they will perform the surgeries.